RSS Feeds

The Anatomy of a Localist RSS Feed

<description>This tag will just be a brief description of events in the Feed.</description>

<item>This tag is required at the beginning of each event.

<title>This tag is simply the title of your event.</title>

<guid>The purpose of these tags is to note the External ID.</guid>

An External ID tells our system that content in the <guid> tag is event #1, so each time the Feed imports it will match the previously imported event #1. If your events do not have an External ID, Localist will see each event as “new” during every import.

The External ID can be anything, like a numerical string or a URL. If you are trying to link to an external website, you’ll have to use the <link> tag. Localist will recognize this as the External ID if <guid> is not present in the Feed.

<pubDate>This is where you’ll note the date and start time of your event.</pubDate>

Date/time MUST be in this format: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 03:30:00 GMT

Time MUST be in 24hr format

You MUST convert your time zone to GMT or UTC (these are interchangeable)

U.S. Standard Time & (GMT offset):

Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)

Central Standard Time (GMT -6)

Mountain Standard Time (GMT -7)

Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8)

Alaska Standard Time (GMT -9)

Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (GMT -10)

U.S. Daylight Time & (GMT offset):

Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4)

Central Daylight Time (GMT -5)

Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -6)

Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7)

Alaska Daylight Time (GMT -8)

Exceptions: Arizona and Hawaii do NOT honor Daylight Savings Time, so they will always be in Standard time.

If the event’s date/time has advanced to the next day in GMT/UTC, this must be reflected in the Feed for it to display properly in Localist.

For example, say an event in your Feed is on Nov 4th at 7:30 pm PST. When you advance the time forward 8 hours, that exact moment in GMT would be Nov 5th at 3:30 am. So, you would have to write that as <pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2019 03:30:00 GMT</pubDate>in the Feed for Localist to convert it to Nov 4th at 7:30 pm PST.

<description>This where you’ll include the description for your event.</description>

</item>This tag is required at the end of each event.

</channel>This tag is required at the end of the Feed.

</rss>This tag is required at the end of the Feed.

– HEADS UP –

At this time, our parser does not accept images. If you add a Feed with the <image> tag, our parser will import events as if that tag is not present.

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